


Triune

by Snickfic



Category: Uncanny X-Force (Comics), Wolverine and the X-Men (Comics)
Genre: Complicated Relationships, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Identity Issues, Post-Canon, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 02:24:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13137144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/pseuds/Snickfic
Summary: Dear Mom and Pops, Evan began.





	Triune

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Who Shot AR (akerwis)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akerwis/gifts).



> Dear recip, as soon as I saw your letter way back in September I knew I had to write you a treat. It only took me until the very last minute to finish it! I really hope you like it.
> 
> This jumps off from the end of Remender's _Uncanny X-Force_ and waves in the general direction of Humphries' follow-up book and Aaron's _Wolverine and the X-Men_ , but I wasn't able to get my hand on those latter books for review, so I'm blaming any not-quite-canonical weirdness on that.

_Dear Mom and Pops_ , Evan began, and paused. He glanced over at Broo asleep in bed, each exhale a soft hiss. Evan found the sound comforting. Probably that was why they were roommates; Broo had gone through three others before Evan. Why were people so mean, Evan wondered, a question he’d asked so many times that now it was as much habit as anything.

Evan stared down at the paper again. He pressed the tip of the pen to it. _Today_ , he wrote.

His stomach felt tight. He took a long, slow breath in, counting like Headmistress Ororo had taught him, and then out again. In and out. “I’m afraid of enclosed spaces,” she’d told him. “Closets, airplanes. This helps.” He’d been too in awe of the idea of Headmistress Ororo being afraid of anything to ask for details.

“Truly pathetic,” someone said. 

A chill ran down Evan’s spine. “Who’s there?”

“Why don’t you turn around and find out? Slowly.”

Evan had always been good at following directions, as long as they didn’t involve killing people. Slowly he twisted in his chair, away from the desk. There was a man sitting on his bed. He was wearing a black mask, and Evan’s very first thought was of the Inhuman king he’d seen pictures of, the man with the little tuning fork on his head. 

Then Evan noticed the zig-zag patterns on the man’s mask and uniform and the familiar shape of his eyes. “Uncle Cluster?” Evan asked. He was cold with shock. He couldn’t move.

The man laughed unpleasantly. “More or less,” he said.

“You’re alive?”

“Evidently,” the man said.

Evan had given a lot of thought to what he would do if Uncle Cluster somehow came back from the dead. A few times, thinking about it, Evan had felt faint stirrings of the rage he barely remembered from those awful days with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. But he’d swallowed it down and swallowed it down, until it kind of just felt like heartburn: annoying but bearable. Other times he’d been sure he’d hug Uncle Cluster and cry until Uncle Cluster peeled him off again.

But this man sitting on Evan’s bed didn’t really invite either hugs or rage. He was too smug. “Why are you here?” Evan asked.

The man shrugged, but it seemed fake. Evan didn’t trust it. “Heard you were here, thought I’d check in.”

The skin prickled across the back of Evan’s neck. “Why?”

The man’s eyes narrowed. Evan braced himself. Power simmered within him, older than rage or hurt, power as pure and heady as the one sip of whiskey Evan had taken from the bottle somebody stole from Headmaster Logan’s liquor cabinet.

Humor crinkled the man’s eyes, but it wasn’t like Uncle Cluster’s humor. It was cold and as dark as the man’s mask. He cocked his head. “Just curious, I guess.”

They might have sat there a long time, Evan stuttering out one useless question after another while this anti-Cluster smirked at him. Maybe Broo would have woken up, and then Evan would have had to kill the man to keep him from killing Broo, and then maybe they’d have had kill Evan.

But none of that actually happened, because the next moment, the man’s eyes got a strange, faraway look. Slowly he slumped backwards onto Evan’s bed, until he was lying flat on his back, his arms sprawled and his feet still on the floor. “Uncle Cluster?” Evan asked carefully.

“Not quite,” someone said, climbing into Evan’s window. It was Miss Elizabeth, clutching a bow in one hand. After her climbed another woman whose mask and cloak and bodysuit looked just like Uncle Cluster’s usual white one, and after _her_ came—Uncle Cluster himself?

“What’s going on?” Evan asked.

His bedroom door slammed open, and there were Headmaster Logan and Headmistress Ororo. They started yelling at Miss Elizabeth—“I told you this plan was only acceptable if he didn’t make contact with the students.”

“Maybe if your perimeter alarms were a little more sensitive!”

Broo woke up and started patting at the bedside table for his glasses. “Thanks,” he said, when Evan handed them to him. “Um, what’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” Evan said.

The woman in Uncle Cluster’s uniform noticed them and detached herself from the group of adults, still yelling at one another. She came and sat on Broo’s bed, by his feet. “Hi.”

“Are you Uncle Cluster’s sister?” Evan asked.

She grimaced. “Not quite,” she said, echoing Miss Elizabeth.

“Who are you?”

“Well—” 

“She’s a third of him,” said the man who actually looked like Uncle Cluster. “As am I. As is—he.” He peered down at the black-masked man on the bed as if just standing too close might get his white coat dirty.

“Oh,” Evan said faintly. The woman grimaced in sympathy.

The adults were getting louder. Evan could just see Idie peeking around the corner of the doorframe, and there were surely more kids behind her. Headmistress Ororo caught him looking and followed his line of sight, and then she looked to the heavens. “This is quite enough,” she said. “The damage is done. Get him out of here.” Evan thought for one horrible moment that she meant him. “Get them all out of here. Take care of whatever business you think you need to take care of _away from my school_.”

“Perhaps you’d let us take the door on the way out, instead of the window,” drawled the man who looked like Uncle Cluster.

Headmistress Ororo stepped deliberately aside, leaving the door wide open, and glared at the room at large. Headmaster Logan sighed. “He’s not going to wake up, is he?” he asked, approaching the man on the bed.

“The psychic arrow pierces through all natural and artificial psychic defenses,” Miss Elizabeth said. “He’ll be out for hours.”

Headmaster Logan sighed again, loud and gustily, and then he heaved the man over his shoulder and headed for the door.

“Wait,” Evan said. Everyone turned to look at him. “Where are you taking him?”

Headmistress Ororo looked sour. Miss Elizabeth said, “Somewhere safe. He won’t bother you, I promise.”

“I’m going with you,” Evan said, pushing to his feet.

Miss Elizabeth smiled gently. “You need to stay here in school, where you can learn.”

“You didn’t even tell me he was alive. Or they were. Or—” Evan didn’t know where to go from there. He didn’t even know how he felt. But he did know that he was going to find out. “You lied to me again,” he said.

Miss Elizabeth held herself very still.

“Why not?” said the white-masked man. “You can bring your little Brood friend there, too. Maybe a couple of your classmates. It’ll be a field trip! We all love those.”

“Shut _up_ ,” Miss Elizabeth said.

The adults argued for a little while longer, but Evan didn’t pay attention to any of them except Headmaster Logan, who watched the rest of them with the black-masked man still thrown over his shoulder. As long as Headmaster Logan was still here, Evan hadn’t missed anything. Evan stuffed some clean underwear in his bag, a sweater and a pair of jeans, and his algebra homework. If he’d learned anything when he was with the Brotherhood, it was that in between when terrible stuff happened, there was a lot of boring downtime.

When he hefted his backpack onto his shoulders, Headmaster Logan nodded approvingly. “Let’s go get you and the cargo situated in that freaky spaceship. These guys’ll be along soon enough.”

Evan gave Broo a wave goodbye as he left. Broo waved uncertainly back.

The _freaky spaceship_ was a little domed thing on squat legs. It didn’t have many seats. Headmaster Logan secured the black-masked man against the wall with a lot of cuffs and rope, and then he made sure Evan’s harness was fastened. “Did you know Uncle Cluster was alive?” Evan asked.

Headmaster Logan sucked in a breath. “Yeah. But kid—don’t get your hopes up. It’s not quite the same.”

“No kidding,” Evan muttered.

The others arrived then, Miss Elizabeth and the other two people that were, apparently, Uncle Cluster. “We could just—” the man said.

“Not without thinking it through,” Miss Elizabeth said.

“We’ve had _months_ to think it through. I assure you, two brains would be plenty.”

“Haven’t we had enough killing?” she asked. He opened his mouth, but the other woman—Aunt Cluster?—put a hand on his arm, and he quieted.

“Where are we going?” Evan asked.

Aunt Cluster looked back at him. Her eyes smiled. “Switzerland,” she said.

\--

On the flight, they explained to Evan who the black-masked man was, who Aunt Cluster and Jean-Phillipe were: they were pieces of Uncle Cluster. They were _all_ the pieces. “All we have to do is put Humpty-Dumpty back together again,” Jean-Phillipe said. “I believe that’s gone well, historically.”

That launched another argument. Evan didn’t try to follow it. It seemed to be an old one, with everyone saying only half the things they meant. Evan watched them instead. Jean-Phillipe’s sarcasm was familiar, although sharper than Evan was used to. Aunt Cluster was quieter than Evan had ever known Uncle Cluster to be. She offered suggestions and calmed disputes in a way that reminded Evan more of himself than of the Uncle Cluster he remembered. Every so often she turned and gave Evan a wink.

When Miss Elizabeth spoke, she was the sharpest and bitterest of all.

\--

Evan had never been to Switzerland, as far as he knew. When he stepped down out of the spaceship, mountains reached above him, and valleys stretched far below—or so it looked, in the one peek he took. He couldn’t even see the ground, just clouds. It made him dizzy.

He followed the others along a bridge to a fortress built into the mountainside. “Where are we?” he asked Aunt Cluster. 

“This is our home.”

Inside it was cozier and much less forbidding. It looked, if not quite like any house he remembered seeing in Kansas, still like _a_ house, rather than a mountain stronghold. Evan found himself left alone on a comfortable red sofa in a living room with windows that couldn’t have been real. “She’ll get you something to eat if you’re hungry,” Aunt Cluster said, and then she went to join the others wherever they’d taken the dark-masked man. 

“Who will?” Evan asked, but she was gone.

He peered around the room. There were paintings on the walls, too, like the ones in Mom’s art book—the coffee table one that Evan hadn’t been allowed to look at until he was nine, for fear he’d damage the pages. He remembered some of the words he’d sounded out then, _expressionism_ and _impressionism_ and _romanticism_. Sometimes Mom tried to paint pictures like the ones on these walls, riotous colors laid down roughly with thick daubs of paint.

Except she hadn’t, really. 

Evan turned away from the paintings, from the expensive-looking sculptures inside little glass cages. There was a piano in the corner with framed photographs in a row across the top. Some were of Uncle Cluster as a boy, already wearing his black and white zig-zags, though clearly smaller and skinnier. But hadn’t the Brotherhood told Evan that Uncle Cluster was an—an invention? A man-made creature? These photos couldn’t be real.

He moved on to the next and squinted before his breath caught in his throat. Next to young Uncle Cluster was—

“There you are,” came a familiar, scratchy feminine voice. Evan turned slowly, feeling sick.

It was Grandma. She looked just the same as always, just as she had in the photo on the piano. Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun, a cardigan was pulled over her shoulder, and her eyes were blank. She held out her arms. “Don’t I get a hug?”

Evan moved jerkily forward, as though a psychic was moving his muscles from afar. Thoughtlessly, without any volition at all, he stepped into Grandma’s embrace and wrapped his arms around her soft middle. His eyes were hot. “You’re not real,” he said.

“Of course I’m real,” she said, unruffled. 

He squeezed his eyes shut and took a deep breath. She smelled as she always did: of fresh-baked bread and bacon, with a trace of that Pacific Pine lotion she used on her hands. Standing there, holding her tight, Evan could almost hear the grumble of the motor on his father’s tractor.

His next breath, he stepped away and opened his eyes. “I can’t,” he said, around the horrible lump in his throat. “I can’t.” And he fled.

He didn’t know where he was going. He found a hall with a concrete floor and walls and lit with halogens. It was sterile and forbidding and a relief after the fakeness of the rooms behind him. He followed it to a t-intersection, and then he took a turn at random. He hoped he’d find someone soon, or something. He was getting hungry.

Finally he heard voices. He followed them and found a sterile, featureless room to match the hallway, and inside it were all the people was looking for, as much as he was looking for anyway. They were all standing around the black-uniformed man, who was lying unconscious on a slab. At least, Evan assumed he was unconscious.

Miss Elizabeth caught sight of him. “Evan,” she said.

“There’s a fake woman here,” he said. He found himself unable to meet her eyes. “She looks like my grandma.”

Miss Elizabeth heaved a sigh. “Of course she does. Jean-Phillipe, do you _never_ think.”

“I think quite a lot,” said Jean-Phillipe. He winked at her over his shoulder.

“There’s no point to this,” Miss Elizabeth said. “Let’s make sure he’s secure and get something to eat. I’m starving.”

The fortress’s kitchen mostly just looked like a kitchen, and they all seemed at home in it. Aunt Cluster put Evan to work shredding cheese. The tension from the containment cell was gone, or at least pushed under the surface. Jean-Phillipe teased the women, making puns that Evan thought must be dirty, although he couldn’t quite figure out how. He couldn’t figure out how the others didn’t mind, either, until Aunt Cluster slid in next to Miss Elizabeth and kissed her hair. Jean-Phillipe looked on hungrily from the kitchen island, his smirk slipping a little.

Oh.

And then Jean-Phillipe came around on Miss Elizabeth’s other side and kissed her hair, too, and Evan’s understanding shifted again.

Aunt Cluster caught him looking. “We’re scandalizing Evan,” she said. She sounded like she smiling.

“No, you’re not,” Evan said. He hunched his shoulders and focused on shredding more cheese.

“We’re only two people between the three of us, remember,” Jean-Phillipe said. “Nothing scandalous about that.”

Evan was not convinced it worked that way, but he kept his mouth shut.

Finally, as they were all eating their hamburgers—Evan eventually gathered that this menu choice was made for his sake, which he couldn’t help feel a little embarrassed about—he said, “What about that woman who looks like Grandma?”

“That’s Mother,” Jean-Phillipe said, and took another bite. He and Cluster had both rolled up the bottoms of their masks so they could eat.

“Sorry, we should have introduced you,” Aunt Cluster said.

Evan looked back and forth between them. They met his stares, unconcerned. Jean-Phillipe kept chewing. Evan looked to Miss Elizabeth for support. She shrugged.

Evan didn’t feel very hungry anymore. It was a struggle to choke down the rest of his hamburger, and then he asked if he could go do his algebra homework in the living room. As he’d hoped, they pointed him in the direction of the living room and let him go.

Once he was there, he thought hard for a moment, remembering each step of the route he’d taken earlier, and then he set out down that same long, sterile hall.

A bunch of things could have gone wrong: someone could have caught Evan, the door could have been locked, the other Uncle Cluster could have been still unconscious. But the door was open, and though Other Uncle Cluster was still lying on the same heavy slab, he rolled his head over to look at Evan as Evan walked in.

“Of course it’s you,” the man said. They’d taken his mask off and tied a heavy band across his forehead. Evan had gathered this was to keep him from tricking people with illusions. 

There was office chair sitting in the corner, the adjustable kind on wheels. It seemed out of place in this concrete fortress. Evan rolled it over to Other Uncle Cluster and sat down. “Why did you come to see me?” Evan asked. “At the schoo?”

Uncle Cluster fixed him with a stare. “I’m Weapon X’s mutant-sentinel hybrid. Why do you think I came looking for one of the most dangerous mutants on the planet?”

Evan had learned a little bit about sentinels at school. He hazarded a guess. “To kill me?”

“Obviously. Idiot.”

“They want to kill you. Or _neutralize_ you.” That had been Miss Elizabeth’s word, which she said was different from killing. Jean-Phillipe had disagreed, but laughing, as though he didn’t actually care.

“Wouldn’t that be convenient?” Uncle Cluster said, though Evan had never heard a sneer like that from him back in Kansas. “Just cut out the bad piece like a bit of dead flesh, so it can’t infect the rest.”

“You’re the one who killed me before. The other me.”

Uncle Cluster shifted so he could stare straight up at the ceiling. “Of course.”

“Which one decided to clone me?”

Uncle Cluster pursed his lips. It was so strange, seeing his lips and his eyes with no mask in between them. Evan felt a little embarrassed for him, like the others had stripped naked and just left him like that. “The hot one, obviously. She’s such a bleeding heart. It was fucking unbearable, sharing a body with that one.”

Evan flinched at the cursing—much worse than anything Pops had ever had to donate to the swear jar for—but he forged ahead. “And which one played catch with me?”

Uncle Cluster took a deep breath in, and slowly he let it out again, just like Headmistress Ororo had taugh Evan. That was when Evan knew a couple of things: his guess was right, and the next thing Uncle Cluster said would be a lie. “The one Betsy calls _Jean-Phillipe_.” His voice was full of disgust. “Can’t focus on a mission for anything, but he can play a game.”

Headmaster Logan had answered Evan’s questions one by one, as Evan had gotten up the courage to ask him. When Evan asked about all the letters he’d written home, Headmaster Logan retrieved them, a whole stack of unopened envelopes, never even stamped. He wasn’t put out when Evan started crying mid-question, or when Evan got so angry his vision went red—and his eyeballs, too, it turned out. 

Headmaster Logan had told Evan a little about Uncle Cluster and how Uncle Cluster was a _selfish fucking bastard_ who’d created Evan as some kind of _penance or experiment or I don’t know what._ But then he had had gotten quiet for a while, and he’d gone for a shot of whiskey from his cabinet. “I think Le Pew figured if Apocalypse himself could turn out okay with the right handling, then there’s hope for all of us. All of you kids, anyway.”

“Was he right?” Evan asked.

Headmaster Logan had downed the shot, set the glass on his desk, and said, “What am I, some kind of oracle? Get along and do your homework.”

The one they called Jean-Phillipe was all smirks and dirty jokes. Even as he was arguing he didn’t seem to care much who won. Aunt Cluster was the nicest one, and she cared a whole lot, but she didn’t need hope. She already knew exactly how the world worked and how to order it to her wishes. In each of them Evan saw hints of someone familiar, but they were each just parts of the whole, like Jean-Phillipe had said.

Evan had known them less than a day, but he’d known his Uncle Cluster his whole life—however short a time that actually had been. And most important of all, he knew how it felt to know, deep down in your gut, that you were evil. 

He checked the straps holding Uncle Cluster down, just in case, and then he laid a hand on Uncle Cluster’s bare arm. Uncle Cluster flinched.

“You’re the one who wanted to bring me back,” Evan said. “You’re the one who came and visited.”

“You are out of your fucking mind. Do you figure I missed you? That I loved you? That I _felt bad_?”

“Yes,” Evan said. Uncle Cluster’s nostrils flared wide. Evan squeezed Uncle Cluster’s arm. “I missed you, too.”

“Mon dieu,” Uncle Cluster said, like a curse. “What have I done to deserve this?”

Evan let go and stepped back. “Do you want to be put back together? Like Humpty-Dumpty?”

“Do I get a choice?” Uncle Cluster demanded.

Evan licked his lips. He was getting that squirmy, queasy feeling he got when Idie wanted to sneak off the grounds, or when Broo wanted to sneak into the library after hours. He swallowed hard. “Maybe.”

Time moved so slowly. Evan’s pulse in his ears counted each second as it ticked past. Finally Uncle Cluster slumped, every muscle going lax. Evan hadn’t realize how tense Uncle Cluster had been until now, when he was as relaxed as a jellyfish. “Yes.”

Evan nodded. He leaned in and kissed Uncle Cluster on the cheek, which he hadn’t done in years. Then he walked away.

His backpack was sitting against the living room sofa, where he’d left it. He got it out and spread it across a table by one of the fake windows. There was a reading lamp next to the table, and Evan turned it on. His chest was tight, not with simple anger or fear but with _feelings_ , roiling and chaotic. It was hard to think through them. The rational expressions he was supposed to simplify swam in his vision, and finally he set his pen down and pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes.

“Having a hard time, biddy?” 

It was Grandma. She sat down at the table. “I used to do puzzles at this table, before the cataracts.”

Evan had a lot of things he wanted to say, like _You never had cataracts_ and _You’re not even real_ , but he felt dazzled and headachey, like he’d stared at the sun and somehow gotten a sunburn, too. He sniffled. Then he shuffled his chair over until it was flush with Grandma’s, and he leaned in for a hug.

“Oh, my sweet boy,” she said, just like she always had. She wrapped her soft arms around him and held him close like she’d always done, and she let him cry.

\--

The process of putting three people back into one sounded messy. Stomach-turning, even, although Miss Elizabeth had forbid anyone from telling Evan the details. But it all happened inside a machine, so Evan was allowed to sit with Miss Elizabeth and watch as the three Clusters climbed inside. A silvery robot woman waited with them, too. She claimed she was actually the freaky spaceship. She had similar coloring, at least.

“This will take a while,” Miss Elizabeth warned. “And after that, it’s going to take some time for the brains to reintegrate into one whole.”

“I know,” Evan said, and continued to spread the contents of his backpack across the worktable. It was nice and big, and there was a stool for him to sit on.

Finally, under the algebra homework and the clothes, he found the letter he’d been working on that evening when Uncle Cluster had come into his room. He smoothed the creases and crumples out and read the beginning, and he waited for the tightness in his throat to pass. Then he continued, 

_Dear Mom and Pops,_

_Today Uncle Cluster’s coming back._

[end]


End file.
